Former football star O.J. Simpson walked out of a Nevada jail at 12:08 a.m. Sunday morning, after serving nine years for a Las Vegas armed robbery.
A Nevada prison spokeswoman told ESPN that Simpson was released from Lovelock Correctional Center just after midnight. He was met by an unidentified driver, but prison officials did not know where Simpson planned to go once free. A friend of Simpson’s, Tom Scotto, who lives in Naples, Florida, says he picked up Simpson Sunday morning, but would not give details on where they were headed, or who they were with.
Simpson ended up at Lovelock as part of a Nevada state prison plan to release him without attracting media attention to “ensure public safety” and to “avoid incident.” To prove Simpson was free, the Nevada Department of Corrections posted a video of Simpson walking out of the Lovelock facility on Facebook:
Simpson has been in a Nevada prison since 2008, when he was convicted of trying to steal back some of his own signed memorabilia (which Simpson said was “stolen” from him during his 1994 murder trial) from a sports collectibles store on the Las Vegas strip. After planning the heist at a nearby, off-strip casino, Simpson and his associates broke into the store under the cover of darkness. The incident ended in an armed confrontation with Las Vegas police — a period of his life, Simpson told a parole panel, he deeply regrets.
Simpson received a harsh sentence for the armed robbery, and served nine years behind bars before a Nevada parole board decided last month that, because he’d been a model prisoner, he could walk free several years before the end of his sentence.
The former football star isn’t off the hook, though. He’ll serve 5 years supervised parole, and must stay in Nevada unless he’s granted a transfer by both Nevada and the state he intends to move to.
Although he was a star on the football field during the 1970s and 80s, Simpson is probably best known — at least by Millennials and Gen Xers — for his 1994 murder trial, where he stood accused of brutally murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter named Ron Goldman, who’d stopped by Nicole’s house to deliver a pair of sunglasses she’d left at his restaurant.
Simpson walked free after a jury acquitted him — a verdict that shocked the nation — but two years later, a civil court found against Simpson, ordering him to pay $33.5 million to Goldman’s family and two of Simpson’s children. A Goldman family lawyer told ESPN that Simpson has never made a payment, and that with interest and court fees, he now owes around $65 million.